Tuesday, March 11, 2014

In May 2009 our late Leighton and I did an event at
Shakespeare and Co, the legendary bookshop in Paris, owned by George Whitman
who had sadly passed away at 98 the week before. That's us with Leighton's
wonderful Dutch son-in-law celebrating afterwards at a bistro across from Gare
du Nord.

But at our event we knew George stood outside,
according to his daughter Sylvia, listening as was his wont on the rickety
staircase landing directing patrons to books and seats. Even in 2009 George
kept his finger on the bookstore's pulse though Sylvia by then had taken over
as manager. Then as now Shakespeare & Company on the Left Bank remains a
magnet for writers, poets and tourists for close to 60 years.

George saw himself as patron of a literary haven and
the heir to Sylvia Beach, the founder of the original Shakespeare &
Company, the celebrated haunt of Hemingway and James Joyce. The store overlooks
the Seine and faces the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, and spreads over three floors.
The night Leighton and I spoke the upstairs was crowded, standing room only,
and we think the microphone worked, a concession George agreed to, so people on
the lower floors could hear. That night my friend Jean-Claude Mules, a retired
Brigade Criminelle inspector showed up and held the crowd in thrall talking
about his ten years working on the Princess Diana investigation. But the smell
of this bookstore, paper, old wood and people stayed with me. With everyone who
visits or crashes there since for decades George provided food and makeshift
beds to young aspiring novelists or writing nomads among the crowded shelves
and alcoves.

George, as many people have recounted, took in the
beat poets Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso. Henry Miller ate from the stewpot,
but was too grand to sleep in the tiny writers' room. Anaïs Nin left her will
under George's bed. There are signed photos from Rudolf Nureyev and Jackie
Kennedy, signed copies of Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs.

George opened his doors midday to midnight, and the
deal then is the deal now: sleep in the shop, on tiny beds hidden among the
bookstacks; work for two hours a day helping out with the running of the place;
and, crucially, read a book a day, whatever you like, but all the way through,
unless maybe it's War and Peace, in which case you can take two days….

At any time there are six or more young people from
the compass points of the world, reading, talking, thinking, boiling spaghetti
in the kettle, running across the road to the public showers, stacking,
carrying, selling, stock-taking, and all in a spirit of energy and enterprise
that is not to be found in any chain bookstores. They stay for two weeks or two
months, and some just sleep outside on a bench until there's room inside.

A heaven of heavens. The store also hosts a tiny
writers' room that anyone is free to use, warmed by a plug-in radiator. Now
operated by George's daughter Sylvia the store runs a biennial literary
festival and is this year launching a publishing company. The Left Bank
building that is its home will expand into the space next door for a café.
Monday nights, the shop has a free reading by a published writer while
writers-in-progress "young hopefuls" meet in the library to read work
to each other. Creative writing weekends are offered. By his own estimate, he
lodged some 40,000 people. He named his daughter, Sylvia Beach Whitman and
expected the bibliophiles residing in his store to work a few hours every day
sorting and selling books. Yet he also invited uncounted numbers of people for
weekly tea parties to his own apartment, or for late-night readings enriched
with dumplings or pots of Irish stew. Some guests later described him as a kind
and magnetic father figure to needy souls but also as a man who could throw
tantrums and preside over the store’s residents, sometimes up to 20 people,
like a moody and unpredictable dictator. That night I remember Sylvia moaning
how her father disliked the 'new' stair railing replacing the one that had
crumbled and called it too modern.

But there's a bit of the past that George kept alive
and he's taken it with him. This from an obituary “I may disappear leaving
behind me no worldly possessions — just a few old socks and love letters, “ he
wrote in his last years. Paraphrasing a line from Yeats, he added, “and my
little Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart.”